The Liberation of Terra Superna

12:00 minute loop, 3 channel projected installation; 2021

Forest Hills Park is a place where contradictions coexist in space and across time: the power of men, the knowledge of women, and the determinacy of plants. Decades prior to the park’s creation, botanist and suffragette Harriet Keeler explored this land, conducting research into native species, advocating for non-intervention and recommending instead that areas remain untouched for some amount of wilderness to exist within the city. Working not only for the freedom of plants, her efforts propelled the surrounding city of East Cleveland (OH) to become the first in the USA to grant women the right to vote. Forest Hills Park was designed in 1938 by landscape architect A.D. Taylor with a willful disregard for the course of nature, instead promoting a harmonious social order amongst the country’s elite. Today, the city is bankrupt and the park is abandoned, becoming once again a haven for rare native plant species.
The Liberation of Terra Superna, a three-channel immersive animation, proposes an alternative environment for the future of Forest Hills Park; one in which the knowledge of our great-grandmothers is valued and the natural world is given political agency. A world where rather than the domination of women, plants, and animals, we learn to collaborate and co-create a future of power sharing across all forms of consciousness. Exploring cycles of birth and death, value and depreciation, dominance and destruction, as well as agency and subjugation, the mythical landscape becomes both a specter of the past and a vision of the future, examining the possibilities for native species to thrive in abandoned public spaces, and for cycles of life to endure and evolve.